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Perhaps we would get more of the old gift culture of the internet back, as in legally free works where the author does not bother with DRM in the first place. The absolute number of those may not increase, but they could gain more visibility when people are angry about excessive DRM and start looking for alternatives.

As an example, I like science fiction novels, and there is quite a bit of free stuff out there.
      - The Baen Free Library, older novels that the publisher Baen Books has released for free, with permission of the authors: http://www.baen.com/catalog/category/view/s/free-library/id/2012
      - The writings of some hobby authors, made available for free on various forums and websites dedicated to such stuff. The quality is varying wildly, of course, but there are some pretty good ones. A favorite of mine is "The Last Angel" by "Proximal Flame", found here: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel.244209/

And of course, the warez scene might not be deterred so easily. As today, there might be a lot of cracked stuff circulating that has its DRM removed.

Actually launching and retrieving flying vehiclies from massive airships is nothing new. the US Akron and US Macon were blimp aircraft carriers carring multiple planes able to both launch and retrieve.

http://www.airships.net/us-nav...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.history.com/topics/...

the russians even built planes that other planes could launch from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

and Darpa still wants these:
http://www.popsci.com/article/...

and both the russians and Lockeed developed concept aircraft based on nuclear powered super planes with runways built into them:
https://forums.spacebattles.co...
russina surface effects nuclear powered sea skimmer concept:
http://englishrussia.com/2015/...

Is there a good site for space battles animations? I used to go to spacebattles.com but they haven't added any content in many years.

Things die for business reasons, not technological reasons. And I'd say rovers that explore Mars on their own is far more advanced than having humans do everything like on Apollo. The Concord died yes, but there are supersonic jets in private ownership (ex-military), it's all a matter of cost. Some things haven't changed much but smart phones, medicine, lots of things have become very much more technologically advanced. It just depends on where you're looking, I'd much rather be in a hospital in 2013 than 1963, thank you very much.

There are 10,000+ imperial star destroyers. 3 can turn a standard earth sized planet into nothing but molten mayhem in about 12 hours.

Where do you get that from?

The entire starfleet couldn't destroy the whole planet. It'd take a thousand ships with more fire power than I've...

By contrast, in Trek, a small fleet can destroy a planet.

1. I want to see a completed Death Star roam into the Borg home world (as seen on Voyager's "I, Borg") and fight it out

2. http://spacebattles.com/
   

Yes, this was discussed in an earlier Slashdot story, " RIAA Argues That MP3s From CDs Are Unauthorized", and in a bunch of other places:

* Boing Boing p2pnet reddit Heise Online (German) Truemors BlogRunner/Digital Rights Hugh Casey IDG (Polish) Geek News Central CE Pro Gizmodo TechDirt Read/Write Web Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection TDPRI WhatReallyHappened.com Slyck Root.cz (Czech) Craigslist Forums Hard OCP Wired.com Uneasy Silence Overclock.net Wake World SpaceBattles.com Hydrogen Audio BrickFilms.com Hockey Zombie iLounge Zune Scene AllmanBrothersBand.com Golem (German) PC Magazin (German) Tweakers (Dutch) Mackauf (German) Wake Space Kino-eye.com Digital Copyright Canada Northwest Progressive Institute Louisville Music News Frant

Altair obviously is not named after some star in Aquila. It is named after the MITS Altair 8800 which was an instant, overwhelming success and its bus became the de facto standard.. and the 8800 was in turn named after a star in Star Trek and not in Aquila. See the emulator. Though these guys think the 8800 was named after the movie Forbidden Planet, but it could also have been Altair sf magazine, which probably was named after a star in Aquila. Of course Altair also means "the flyer" in Arabic which is better than considering it an ill-starred lover. Though any of the above would provide for great mission logos too. Anyway it is difficult to work out who named what since the 8800 was named after the star Altair that the Starship Enterprise was heading for, but the Space Shuttle Enterprise was obviously named after the Star Trek Starship, or maybe after a balloon, or a seafaring ship, and probably not Branson's suborbital.

...yes at least the mods keep us happy after the The Babylon 5 Combat Simulator was canceled by Sierra.

I'm looking forward to the fan film Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning getting Finnished.

Movies on another site, the space battles, are kind of amusing, but pretty silly.

I know I can't speak for everyone, but you can find many many models from all sorts of Sci-Fi TV shows on the net. Have any of you ever been to Spacebattles?

If Paramount, or any other Sci-Fi related movie studio for that matter had any issues with people making derivative works/parodies (Fair use anyone?), that site would have been shut down a long long time ago, but it still stands.

Just my $0.02.

There's some awesome rendered battle movies here.

Pity the site hasn't been updated since 2000.